BARCELONA—Why are we seeing the new Yotaphone a year before it will appear in the U.S.? The company is crowdsourcing, Yota Devices CEO Vlad Martynov said.
"We're a small startup. It's very critical for us to get feedback from the market: if people need [our phone] and what kind of things you can do with an always-on display," he said.
The new Yotaphone is one of the most talked-about devices at this year's Mobile World Congress. With a full HD screen on the front, an E-Ink touch screen on the back and a speedy Snapdragon 800 processor, it doesn't look or work like anything else out there.
The first model, which just came out in Russia and a few other European countries for €499 unlocked, was an early adopter device so the company could figure out how to build an E-Ink phone, and customers could start figure out what to do with one. The new model is coming to the U.S., and it'll be the "mainstream" Yotaphone, Martynov said. He confirmed the company is talking to one U.S. carrier about the device, but didn't want to say which one.
"For a mass-market device, it should be very intuitive. You should be able to give this phone to a 3-year-old boy or girl and they'll figure out in a minute what to do," he said. If user-interface improvements can be implemented in software over the next year, they'll come to the first Yotaphone, but the accumulated knowledge of a year's worth of devices will benefit the second phone, he said.
"For us, that was a deliberate decision. We don't really want to go mass market with the first-generation device," Martynov said. That means building about 30,000 Yotaphones max per quarter this year.
Yota's manufacturing partner is learning, too. The Yotaphone is made at an ex-Motorola factory in China by a Singaporean company, and of course, there's never been anything like it before, with its dual LCD and E-Ink screens. That created some unique manufacturing challenges, Martynov said.
"When we started, we didn't realize that the e-paper display is very heat sensitive. The top and bottom temperatures can't be more than 5 degrees off," he said. Yota and its partner had to go back to the drawing board to design a new heat dispersal system that distributes the phone's heat very evenly.
With one Yotaphone a year for the foreseeable future, we should look forward to seeing each year's model well in advance - and to seeing the one which one all of this year's awards appearing in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2015.
"I truly believe in crowdsourcing when you do product development," he said.
For more, check out PCMag's hands on with the Yotaphone from MWC (slideshow above) and the video below.